An automatic object detection technology in which a computer automatically recognizes a type and a location of an object is a technology having high utilization in various industrial fields.
In particular, a vehicle detection technology as a technology that automatically detects a vehicle positioned around a user serves to automatically detect a vehicle which the driver does not recognize and help the driver drive the vehicle in a safer environment. Further, the vehicle detection technology is a technology that can be utilized in various fields such as automatic and safe driving of the vehicle or vehicle detection on a road. In particular, as a research into automation of driving of the vehicle and industrialization have been in progress in recent years, the vehicle detection technology as a previous step for automatic driving control has been remarkable as a primary research field.
The vehicle detection technology in the related art includes a vehicle detection scheme using an image sensor and a vehicle detection scheme using a radar sensor. The vehicle detection scheme using the radar sensor is disadvantageous in terms of cost efficiency in that vehicle detection performance deteriorates and further, an expensive radar sensor needs to be used.
The scheme that detects the object and the vehicle by using the image sensor in the related art includes a scheme using a Haar-like feature depending on a difference of a pixel value in the image and a scheme using a Gabor filter extracting a feature of the vehicle in a frequency domain. However, the scheme using the Haar-like feature has a problem in that detection performance deteriorates and the scheme using Gabor filter has a limit in that since a calculation amount is large, it takes a long calculation time.
The scheme that detects the object and the vehicle by using the image sensor in the related art further includes a scheme that extracts a feature of the object and detects the object by using a histogram of edge direction components. However, since the above scheme cannot consider an edge-direction distribution location, the above scheme has a problem in that there is a limit in the detection performance.